Insights - Insights

Our musings on all things Sales and Service

Use Sales Skills in L&D to GTD

(Get Things Done)

If you ask an L&D professional what they have in common with their colleagues in Sales, you would probably expect them to say, ‘Not much’.
Yet, even though Sales and L&D have different goals, motivations and pressures, they share the...

Imparta Features on Selling Power’sTop 20 Sales Training Company List

Imparta is delighted to announce the company’s inclusion on Selling Power’s 2018 list of the Top 20 Sales Training Companies that excel in helping sales leaders improve the performance of their sales teams. The list appears in the May...

The Art of Consultative Selling

How can you enhance your sales team’s performance and guarantee ongoing success?
The digitization of sales is increasing the pressure on salespeople to succeed. More informed buyers, along with economic and political uncertainly and disruptive technologies, have all contributed to...

Smart Ideas for Successful Engagements with Modern Procurement Teams

In this, the third installment from Trelleborg’s Jonas Olsson, we provide insights and ideas, straight from a master of the arts of procurement, to help you better navigate your next engagement with a modern procurement team: Be sticky. You should always...

What Makes an Outstanding Sales Manager?

Webinar with the APS

Richard Barkey, Founder and CEO of Imparta, and ex-McKinsey consultant shares his 20 years’ experience of working with sales managers in companies such as Cisco, Intel and Telefonica.

Four Powerful Questions to Enhance Your Customer’s Retail Experience

Mystery shopping is a brilliant tool for auditing customer experience as it happens. There are over half a million mystery shopping trips carried out every year in the United Kingdom (according to the Mystery Shopping Professionals Association).
Retailers are becoming...

The Key Dynamics of the Procurement RFQ Process – and What They Mean to You

We have lost count of the number of times friends and business leaders have complained about how much harder business is today ‘because of Procurement’ – profits from cozy and long-established relationships have diminished. Procurement get involved earlier in...

How to Stay on the Right Side of Procurement

We have lost count of the number of times friends and business leaders have complained about how much harder business is today ‘because of Procurement’ – profits from cozy and long-established relationships have diminished. Procurement get involved earlier in...

Retail Customer Experience – A Game of Snakes & Ladders

In a world of gaming, VR and AI, could it be that an old-fashioned board game is the answer to delivering better retail sales results?
While working with retailers to improve their Sales through Service over the past 18 months,...

Make the Fitting Room an Awesome Customer Experience

There is probably only one real reason for a normal person to go into a fitting room: to make a purchase decision!
These little rooms can be the doorways to higher revenues – and retail companies would do well to...

How to Make the Right First Impression When the Customer Enters Your Store

‘Can I help you – or are you just looking?’
This is the ‘question’ that I so often hear when entering a store on my local main street. However, the body language of the sales assistant often makes it obvious...

A New Era for Imparta

This year marks our 20th anniversary. To highlight our continued growth and success, we have launched a new website. We have also taken this opportunity to extend, refine and improve the services we offer to our clients. This progression...

Reflections on Learning Technologies 2017

Learning Technologies was a great success for us – not only did we get to meet some wonderful people, but it acted as the backdrop for us to publicly launch our innovative new offering, The Imparta Virtual Sales Academy™.
The Virtual Sales...

E-Learning Optimizes Onboarding

In the early years of e-learning, many companies confused cost savings with value. Libraries of e-learning modules were subscribed to, LMS systems purchased, and cost savings celebrated. But learners were disengaged, the learning experience could be dull and repetitive,...

How Are You Delivering Complaints Justice?

Our most recent customer research and insight shows that organizations need to rethink conventional approaches to handling complaints. Businesses are driving customers down a complaints route even when it’s a service conversation they want – over 50% of customers don’t want...

Six Complaints Barriers: What Do the Experts Say?

There is an ongoing gap between what customers say they want and the experience many organizations actually deliver. Imparta gathered together a group of senior customer experience professionals to discuss why.
According to Imparta’s UK consumer panel, less than 1 in...

Sales Onboarding – a Necessity or a ‘Nice to Have’?

In the second installment of our Sales Onboarding series, we quantify the critical need for a comprehensive sales induction program.
You’ll know from the first part of our series that a first-class induction program requires a significant investment in time and money....

Sales Onboarding – Challenges, Opportunities and Solutions

Welcome to the first of our sales induction blogs. Over the coming weeks, we will discuss the importance, challenges and opportunities associated with successful sales onboarding programs. Here we look at the real costs of bringing on new salespeople.
Sales...

Collections Without Conflict

There are two assumptions often made by debt collectors: The debtor is trying to avoid paying where possible.
The more pressure applied to a customer, the faster the debt will be repaid. These two principles are at odds with everything else customer-centric...

After the Event: A Snapshot of Our Complaints Insight

Less than 1 in 4 consumers say that the complaints they made to large organizations last year were resolved satisfactorily.
We spent much of the first half of 2016 focusing on the challenges businesses face when handling customer dissatisfaction, and...

Conversation or Complaint

Who decides? Reflecting on the event

The striking backdrop of the Soho Hotel, with its wild bright red and cow print screening room, was the perfect location for our complaints insight event.
Nigel Webb, Chief Product Officer, delivered a thought provoking session about how customer dissatisfaction...

You May Be Digital – I Am Still Human

There is no doubt that contacting the organizations we do business with has become considerably easier since the birth of the contact center and the explosion of digital channels and self-service platforms. But does this ease of access actually...

Awards, Accreditations and Prizes

Are they worth it?

Imparta has enjoyed a recent flurry of success, winning multiple industry awards and notable accreditations. This included a Gold for Sales Training Practice of the Year at the 2016 Stevie® Awards, inclusion in TrainingIndustry.com’s Top 20 Sales Training Companies...

Dear Digital, meet Analog

Our online and offline experiences have officially merged. Amazon, that bastion of online sales and service, now has its own bookshop made from bricks and glass instead of the usual 1s and 0s.
The message is pretty clear. Humans still...

Battling with Robots

Selling in a world of automated procurement

Poking at, ranting about and dismissing online procurement tools is the birthright of all salespeople. When I go to conferences and events, this topic is often the icebreaker. We trade horror stories about how difficult these tools are to...

Can We Handle the Truth?

Jack Nicholson as Col Jessep famously said, “You can’t handle the truth!” (A Few Good Men, 1992) and maybe he had a point – well that certainly seems to be what many companies think when they position and market...

How Your Sales Team Can Set You Apart in a Commoditized Market

In the past, business success was all about size – the large eating the small. Today business is all about speed – the fast eating the slow. However, most people and organizations react to a change in the market...

Complaint Conversations – Are You Delivering the Justice the Customer Is Looking For?

We know what is going through your mind when you read that heading: “Justice – what has that got to do with complaints, and isn’t that a serious word to be using for a simple service conversation?”
Over the last...

Why Do Companies Turn Service Conversations into Complaints?

Why does a simple service conversation about something that went wrong get turned into a formal complaint? As a customer, you may have felt forced into speaking to a specialist complaint handler because nobody else had the skills and...

The Mixed Bag

Taking on a salesforce of mixed abilities, background and experience

We’re approached by many sales organizations who have suffered from frustrating legacy organizational challenges. They have to overcome these challenges to progress, but are wary of the cultural and organizational implications of changing too much, too fast.
One of the...

Complaint OR Conversation?

Do you use the term “complaint” when you make contact with a company after receiving a product or service that you find unsatisfactory? For many of us, as customers, we don’t define this as a complaint – we just...

The Five Trends in B2B Sales Learning and Development for 2016

As we approach the end of the year, we’ve been thinking about what 2016 will bring for L&D teams delivering performance improvement in B2B sales training.
For many companies, the dominant trends in B2B sales L&D spending in 2013 and...

B2B Sales Leaders and Managers

Considerations when launching a new proposition

A new product or service is launched. Ambitious targets are set. Marketers work with their agencies on campaigns, collateral and channel support. Excitement is high in head office… then, six months later, the recriminations start.
The sales team complain that...

Emotional Intelligence

The Chimp Paradox

Leaders in recent times have come to be judged not only by their Intelligence Quotient (IQ) but also their Emotional Quotient (EQ), also known as Emotional Intelligence (EI). EI is how well you can use emotion in your leadership...

Five Ways to Achieve Effective Communication in Your Sales Team

Communication is at the heart of what makes an outstanding sales manager…
A highly successful CEO and former colleague of mine, when asked during a company conference, “What do you think are the three most important lessons you have learned...

From Salesperson to MD of HP

Andy Isherwood on how he got to the top

In November 2013, Andy Isherwood was appointed Managing Director of Hewlett Packard (HP) UK & Ireland after almost 28 years at the company, having entered the HP graduate training program straight out of university. Andy’s sales career has been...

Effectively Managing Performance in Your Team

Quantity, Direction and Quality

Performance management is a bit like going to the gym; it’s one of those things that everyone talks about doing, but not many actually do (at least not effectively). To have a fit and healthy sales organization, you need...

The Five Types of Sales Manager

Good sales managers are the engine of any commercial organization, but, if your experience is similar to mine, you will have found that the number of poor sales managers outweighs the number of good sales managers. By observing the...

How to Generate Reliable Forecasts

In the third installment of ‘What Makes an Outstanding Sales Manager?’ our Chief Commercial Officer, Janet Garcia, will be using her many years of success within sales leadership to advise the best way to accurately forecast revenue figures.
Forecasting is...

Six Vital Signs for Successfully Managing Your Sales Pipeline

What makes an outstanding sales manager?

We’re running a series of short articles designed to answer the most important question in sales management: What makes an outstanding sales manager? Carrying on from her last thought piece, Janet Garcia, Chief Commercial Officer at Imparta, will be...

What Makes an Outstanding Sales Manager?

A Sales Director's Respective

With the launch of our new Sales Management Program imminent, we are answering the most important question associated with those in sales management – what makes an outstanding sales manager?
To answer this, we have drawn upon the knowledge of...

Time and Territory Management

Double the size of your sales team without hiring a single person

Effective selling is not just about what happens when your team is in front of their customers. The actual proportion of time spent selling effectively depends on several factors: The % of time spent actively selling (vs. other things, including...

Behavioral Economics in the Call Center

To BE or not to BE?

Behavioral economics, or BE, can be used to transform the way customers make economic and personal choices including those related to an organization’s services. In particular, it challenges the view that people make decisions rationally. One of the hottest topics...

Sales Training Goes Experiential

Exploring the available options in modern sales training

Most people acknowledge that, where skills are concerned, adults “learn by doing”. The UK’s National Institute of Adult Continuing Education, for example, reports that, “we are likely to remember 90 per cent of what we read, hear, see, say...

Selecting a Partner to Help You Improve Sales Effectiveness

Key buying criteria and potential risks

Selecting a partner
Over 80% of training spend is wasted, according to research… but equally, the right kind of intervention can generate huge returns. So how do you ensure that the solution you choose is headed for success, rather than...

B2B Marketing

A seven-step guide to launching new propositions through your salesforce

This blog is based on a white paper. You can read the entire white paper here. Alternatively, you can listen to the podcast for this white paper above or by visiting the Imparta YouTube channel.
The Problem
The tensions between sales and marketing...

Reducing the Break-even Time for New Salespeople

Five ways to speed up revenue generation

What’s your biggest barrier to growth?
For most companies the sales team is a significant engine of organic growth. Unless you already have a dominant market share, or operate in a commodity business where price is the only issue, increasing...

The Sales Behaviors That Keep Companies Winning

First, get the managers coaching
The first challenge in driving performance lies not with the market or the economy, but with your sales managers. Putting a salesperson under pressure to produce results without coaching them on the “how” creates a...

Developing a Sales Academy to Drive Sales Performance

The Background
The company operated in an industry characterized by intense competition between four leading companies and a range of smaller companies with differing business models.
Their business sales management team challenged themselves to overcome their customers’ price driven mindset. To...

Why Sales Training Doesn’t Work

And what to do about it

Selling isn’t a great sport in which to come second. In the world of “winner takes all”, anything that gives you a small increase in performance relative to the competition can have a huge impact on your achievements. It’s...

Get Real

the future of learning

I was on a call with a client last night, and they asked where I thought training was going over the next few years.
Some time ago, Imparta sponsored a research project by Training Journal in the UK, called Learning...